Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) utilize a number of point Infrastructure Technology (IT) solutions today. Broadly speaking, IT for small businesses encompass network devices, storage nodes, application or compute elements and client devices. Network devices typically include networking/security products such as DSL/Cable modems, Wireless LAN routers, Network/Application Firewalls, Virtual Private Networking (VPN) concentrators. Storage elements include external storage drives, tape drives as well as data protection/disaster recovery appliances and network-attached storage and file share services. Application or compute elements include on premise-based or hosted servers as well as the range of applications typically used by small businesses. Client devices include Desktop PCs, Mac's, tablets and other types of client devices. These IT functions require high-touch and cumbersome on-premise installation while maintenance/support is conducted on a point product basis either by an IT savvy small business owner/employee, internal IT staff or delegated IT consultant using manual methods or vendor provided, web-based support and maintenance tools for each of these point products or command-line interfaces (CLIs) on a per device per location basis. Serving a large set of locations and devices becomes a practical challenge, highly inefficient and very expensive. Additionally, with rapid advancements in cloud-computing technologies, SMBs now have many options of utilizing multi-tenant cloud-based or internally hosted application services in addition to supporting premise based IT functions such as network devices or client devices which are required for all cases. While hosted, multi-tenant application services provide economic benefits, they magnify provisioning and management challenges especially in hybrid IT environments, as shown, for example, in FIG. 1. In summary, key challenges facing a hybrid small business IT environment include, without limitation: Integration of existing premise-based IT with hosted or cloud based IT frameworks; comprehensive IT services management; unified security and authentication framework for premise and new cloud-based services; automated and delegated IT management and comprehensive monitoring and control functions of all hybrid IT services.